01/27/2014

The course of New Yorkers into and through my house is a fluid one. They arrive every week (I'm not even sure on which day), but rather than being read or even stacked up in some orderly, chronological way, they slip into the undifferentiated flow of well-edited words that constantly circulates through the building: NYRBs, Harper'ses, Bookforums, NYT Mags, etc., but mainly New Yorkers. It's not just their nontopical covers that make them so easily subsumed, it's that I usually have three or four issues folded open at once (in various rooms), so it's as if they don't even have covers, which puts the idea of a "current" issue of the New Yorker in a different light: they are all part of the same current. They wash through the house--often getting lodged in eddies for months--and don't exit until I finally make it through a particular issue and divert it into the recycling stream.

Which explains why it wasn't until a few weeks after its December 9 cover date that I got to "Why?", James Wood's recent piece on fiction and death. If I had known how specifically it would help me think about some things I had been thinking about, though, I would have opened it right away. In my last post here, I tried to explain why so many of my favorite stories in A Reader's Book of Days had to do with death. Honestly, though, I didn't try that hard. "Death is dramatic, I guess," was all I really came up with, and when I talked about the same thing soon after with Mary Ann Gwinn, in one of the many exchanges that didn't make it into our Seattle Times Q&A, I didn't do much better.

But Wood does. First he cites Benjamin, Blanchot, Bernhard, Calvino, and his wife (Claire Messud), who all agree that death, beyond its own obvious drama, gives life a shape by giving it an ending. Death makes life a story, in other words. "Suddenly," as Messud wrote in condolence to a friend who had just lost her mother, "the whole trajectory is visible." (Perhaps only a novelist would find that idea consoling.) And then Wood turns the thought further by arguing that death, implicit or explicit, is what gives fiction its shape as well: "fiction, the great life-giver, also kills, not just because people often die in novels and stories, but, more important, because, even if they don't die, they have already happened." Every fiction is in the past tense, because it is complete even as we read it. Every novelist is both creator and destroyer. Every fiction is an obituary.

Wood calls out a lineup of his usual heroes (Naipaul, Sebald, Nabokov, Spark, et al.) who are especially conscious of this godlike power: they are not shy of wielding it, but they do so in ways that lay bare its limits. I agree: some of those writers--Sebald and the imperious Spark especially--are among the ones who I've felt have released me to the pleasures (and the productive anxieties) of narrative power in my own storytelling, both in fiction and in the many, many anecdotes of the RBD. One of the real joys in writing--and I hope in reading--that book of a thousand tiny tales was the summing up it required (embraced, even). There's a craftsperson's satisfaction in paring down an event, or a life, into a hundred and fifty words or so, but let's be clear: it's a god's satisfaction too. The shorter the stories, and the more of the mess of a full life you prune away, the more godlike (or Spark-like) an authority you claim. You decide what's important about that life and, more crucially, what's not.

And Wood helped me understand that: four-fifths of the way through, "Why?" already felt like it was speaking directly to just the sorts of things I had been thinking about. But then, after his nod to A House for Mr. Biswas (which he must be contractually obligated to mention in every essay), Wood made that feeling more acute by turning to his final example: Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. It's one of my many minor regrets about the RBD that Fitzgerald hardly appears there. I've blamed that on the fact that she's one of those recent, near-canonical authors (Angela Carter's another) whose lives weren't yet quite primed for mining by a secondary (or tertiary) book like mine: Hermione Lee's biography, the first full one of Fitzgerald, wasn't published until this year, too late for my deadline. But I've no real excuse: there was already a book of her letters available, and of course there are her novels, which, somehow, I never got around to checking for dates (probably for the simple and shameful reason that the fiction "F"s are on a lower shelf in my basement, hidden behind the sofa).

I've often declared (not falsely!) my love for The Blue Flower, her novel about the poet Novalis, even though I've never finished it. (There's a blog post yet to be written--appropriately, I guess--about loving books I haven't finished.) And as it turns out, The Blue Flower is filthy with dates, the last of which appears on the last page of the book, in what Wood calls, admiringly, a "blank, colorless, uninflected sentence":

The Bernhard was drowned in the Saale on the 28th of November 1800.

It is a one-sentence obituary for a twelve-year-old child, the "genius of the family" in the rest of the novel, and in its murderous brevity it's the ultimate expression, you might say, of the godlike sweep of the hand of the omniscient storyteller. But even as it sums up, and seems to dismiss, his short life in that short sentence, its very "blank, colorless, uninflected" bluntness carries a poignancy that escapes its terse limits. The tragedy of the Bernhard's life may be that his promising life was ended so early; the tragedy of that sentence is that there is no way you can capture his consciousness in a single declaration. If, to follow Wood, every fictional sentence is a death sentence, every one of those sentences is, to some extent, unjust, because it can never do full justice to the life it sums up.

And the (minor, minor) tragedy of the RBD is that, without the Bernhard, it too is incomplete. November 28 is an especially full day already--it's the day Virginia Woolf celebrated what would have been the ninety-sixth birthday of her late father by declaring that if he had lived she would never have written, and it's also the day Kurt Vonnegut wrote a spoof letter to his uncle on General Electric stationery and the night Truman Capote hosted his Black and White Ball. (It's so full that I only had a sentence's worth of space for William Shakespeare paying £40 for his license to marry Anne Hathaway.) But knowing now that I missed the chance to include the blank, colorless, uninflected death of the Bernhard, in all its thematically appropriate concision, gives page 372 a haunting absence that, for me at least, echoes the sad incompletion of the Bernhard's own fictional life.

12/02/2013

I've realized a couple of things while reading from A Reader's Book of Days in various eastern and western bookshops the past few weeks. One: the stories (at least the ones I choose in my on-the-fly editing as audience members shout their birthdays) read better than I expected. I wasn't sure if my Rube Goldberg sentences, arranged in tiny tales crammed with as much info and interest as I could pack into a hundred and fifty words, would work when spoken, but I think they actually work better. Telling the stories aloud, I can adjust the pace and emphasis to ease a listener's way through my narrative convolutions. Maybe there should be an audiobook!

And two: there's a lot of death in the book. (I found myself apologizing for it--in an I'm-not-really-apologizing kind of way--at most stops.) There are plenty of stories of life in there too, of beginnings and hopeful successes, but clearly I was often drawn to stories about endings. I shouldn't be surprised, I guess: I love obituaries, and considered the life-summing concision of the best of them a model for my own storytelling. What can better focus drama into a single paragraph, after all, than death? And so if I make a list of my favorite stories of writers facing the end from A Reader's Book of Days, I have dozens to choose from, but here is an even dozen. It seems a little ghoulish, even to me, to rank them, though, so I've just arranged them chronologically through the year. As it happens, that places, appropriately, some of my very favorites at the end: the Margaret Wise Brown story bewilders me with its surprising turns, the Kleist one makes me almost as giddy as its protagonists. And William James writing a last letter to his father? Well, I'm just glad no one in my audiences has asked for a reading from December 14: I'm not sure I could have gotten through that one without breaking down.

January 28, 1728. On this evening Jonathan Swift received a message he had been dreading, announcing the death of Esther Johnson and, with it, the end of the great friendship of his life. They met when he was twenty-one and she just eight: he tutored her as a child, nicknaming her Stella, and when she reached maturity she followed him to Dublin. Biographers doubt the rumors they were married in secret and generally trust Swift's assertions of their celibacy, but the passion between them was unmistakable: as Swift wrote to a friend, "Believe me that violent friendship is much more lasting, and as much engaging, as violent love." After her death, Swift confessed in "On the Death of Mrs. Johnson" that he was too heartsick to attend her funeral, and indeed had to move away from a window through which he could see the light from the church where it was being held.

February 9, 1977. “Eva, my love, it’s over,” Stieg Larsson wrote his girlfriend, Eva Gabrielsson. “As I leave for Africa, I’m aware of what’s waiting for me . . . I think this trip might lead to my death.” At twenty-two Larsson, a science fiction fanzine editor and Trotskyite, was setting out for Africa, where he would put his Swedish national service training to use by teaching a group of female guerrilla fighters in the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front to fire mortars in their independence struggle against Ethiopia. Certain he’d die there, he made out the only will of his life before leaving, a will that, at his death twenty-seven years later with his Millennium Trilogy yet to be published, left Gabrielsson, still his girlfriend, without control of his estate, his works, or even their shared apartment.

February 12, 1988. The death of Thomas Bernhard by assisted suicide on this day, after years of illness, was, by his request, not revealed to the public until four days later, following a small private funeral. Also revealed was Bernhard’s final joke on the native country he had spent his career despising: a will that stipulated that none of his writings “shall be produced, printed, or even just recited within the borders of the Austrian state, however that state defines itself, for the duration of the legal copyright.” But like the artistic efforts of so many of his novels’ characters, this last gesture was a failure: ten years after his death, Bernhard’s heirs let the ban on production of his plays in Austria lapse, allowing his compatriots to enjoy, once again, his mockery of them.

March 14, 1858. “My dear Beth died at three this morning,” Louisa May Alcott recorded. Elizabeth, the third Alcott sister and the quietest, had contracted scarlet fever two years before, much like the last illness of Beth, the third March sister—and the only one whose name matches her model in the Alcott family—in Little Women. Alcott also noted a “curious thing”: that just after Beth breathed her last, “I saw a light mist rise from the body, and float up and vanish in the air.” Her mother saw the same, and the family doctor explained, “It was the life departing visibly.” The following day, her sister’s pallbearers included “Mr. Emerson” and “Henry Thoreau.”

May 10, 2012. David Rakoff’s essays were hard to separate from his voice; many of them began, in fact, as monologues on This American Life, the radio show he contributed to from its beginnings in the mid-’90s. Along the way, he told stories of the cancer that had first struck him at age twenty-two and then returned two decades later, and in his last appearance on the show, at a live performance recorded on this day, three months before he died, Rakoff, once a dancer, with his left arm rendered useless by his tumor and surgery, danced again, alone onstage, to Nat King Cole’s “What’ll I Do?”

July 11, 1942. On this morning, three days after all books by Jewish authors were banned from sale in occupied France, Irène Némirovsky took a walk in the woods in the village of Issy-l’Évêque, where she had fled from Paris in 1940. She brought with her the second volume of Anna Karenina, the Journal of Katherine Mansfield, and an orange, and sat “in the middle of an ocean of leaves, wet and rotting from last night’s storm, as if on a raft.” That same day, she wrote her editor, “I’ve written a great deal lately. I suppose they will be posthumous books but it still makes the time go by.” Two days later she was seized by the French police and four days after that shipped in a cattle car to Auschwitz, where she died a month later, sixty years before Suite Française, the book she left unfinished, was discovered and published.

August 18, 1563. Though as a teenager he wrote a political essay against tyranny, "On Voluntary Slavery," that is still read to this day, Étienne de La Boétie is largely remembered for one reason: as the bosom friend of Michel de Montaigne, who, having spent the previous ten days at La Boétie's side despite the threat of contagion, recorded his death from plague at 3 a.m. on this day. They had known each other only six years, but it's often been thought that Montaigne's retreat to a life of writing, almost a decade after La Boétie's death, was a way of keeping himself company in the absence of his friend, about whom he wrote, in the essay titled, naturally, "Of Friendship," "We were halved throughout, to a degree, I think that by outliving him, I defraud him of his part."

September 21, 1939. Living in exile from the Nazis in London, with his suffering from terminal mouth cancer nearly unbearable, Sigmund Freud selected his reading from his library with care. On September 20, he read his final book, La peau de chagrin, Balzac’s tale of a man who finds a magic hide that grants him wishes but shrinks, along with his remaining life, with each wish. “This was the proper book for me to read,” he remarked to his doctor, Max Schur; “it deals with shrinking and starvation.” The following day, he reminded Schur of his promise “not to forsake me when the time comes.” Schur hadn’t forgotten, and over the next two days administered doses of morphine strong enough that Freud never woke from their effects.

November 9, 2011. Christopher Hitchens's hospital room in the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston was, as Ian McEwan put it, raised temporarily “to the condition of a good university library.” It was Hitch’s last home, and when McEwan made his final visit there Hitchens borrowed the Peter Ackroyd book his friend had been reading on the plane and finished it that night. Hitchens would be dead in a little more than a month—and had few illusions it would be otherwise—but still he worked away, weakened by pain and morphine, at a 3,000-word review of a Chesterton biography, while talking of Dreiser, Browning, and The Magic Mountain with his friends. McEwan, by Hitchens’s request, read Larkin’s “Whitsun Weddings” aloud, and their debate about its ending’s ambiguous arrows continued, unresolved, into the last e-mails that followed their in-person goodbyes.

November 13, 1952. Though she was just forty-two, Margaret Wise Brown had nearly a hundred children’s books to her name when she took ill while traveling in Europe. Treated for an ovarian cyst, she grew fond of the nuns at the hospital and, to show one how well she was doing before being released, kicked one foot high in the air from her hospital bed, dislodging a blood clot in her leg that quickly traveled to her brain and killed her. With typically impulsive generosity—and little imagining it would take effect so soon or that its value would increase so significantly—she had recently revised her will to leave the copyright to most of her books, including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, to a friend’s eight-year-old son, who spent most of his adult life as a drifter, arrested for petty crimes and living off his ever-growing royalty checks.

November 21, 1811. Fulfilling a suicide pact both delirious and deliberate, Heinrich von Kleist, a young dramatist and novelist considered by his family a parasite and a wastrel, shot Henriette Vogel, a woman with terminal cancer who had captivated him with her passion for death, and then himself at a rural inn outside Berlin. The two spent their final moments drinking coffee and rum and chasing each other like children, after writing letters of reconciliation and explanation to family and friends, assuring them that their souls were about to ascend “like two joyous balloonists” and making arrangements for their death, including, in Vogel’s case, ordering a commemorative cup for her husband’s Christmas present and, in Kleist’s, asking the Prussian secretary of war to pay a final barber’s bill he had forgotten.

December 14, 1882. As Henry James Sr., the mercurial patriarch who cultivated a family of geniuses, approached his death, his daughter, Alice, took to her bed, his son Henry embarked for home by ship from London, and his son William, also in London, wrote a farewell letter that, like Henry Jr., arrived in Boston too late to greet his “blessed old father” before he passed. William’s letter is as accepting of death (“If you go, it will not be an inharmonious thing”) as his father, who welcomed it, and touchingly Jamesian in its combination of affection and analysis: “It comes strangely over me in bidding you good bye, how a life is but a day and expresses mainly but a single note—it is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary good night. Good night my sacred old Father."

11/15/2013

I began this post on a train midway between Boston and Philadelphia, midway through my first book tour. Lots of good and fun things happening since A Reader's Book of Days (see purchase links to the right) was published on November 4: enough that I've been too busy to check my Amazon rank every hour (just as well) and too busy to post an update here, until now.

First, the thing I've most been looking forward to sharing is now shareable: my homemade book video, "How A Reader's Book of Days Was Made," shot on location in my basement, living room, dining room, and son Peter's room, as well as Elliott Bay Books, Open Books, the University of Washington library, and the Seattle Central Library:

I've been showing the video at each of my stops, but we were only able to post it live on Tuesday, when we found the right (public domain!) soundtrack. I have to confess I had way too much fun shooting it--I recommend the activity for any author stewing in that in-between time after the book is finished but before it's out in the stores. All the books in the video, by the way, are included somehow in the RBD, but of course they are just a small fraction of the riches within...

I've had events large, small, and mid-sized so far in Seattle, Bellingham, New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia, and I'm on my way to D.C., L.A., Portland, and back home to Seattle. Here are some of the nice reactions to the book (and to the New York event!) so far:

Mary Norris (longtime New Yorker copyeditor) at the magazine's Page-Turner blog on the "thrilling" Literary Jeopardy! night I hosted at McNally Jackson Books in Manhattan. Do I really have "something hawklike about the eyes"?

Elizabeth Taylor's "Editor's Choice" in the Chicago Tribune: "It's a treasure hunt between book covers — and my new favorite gift book."

Kate Tuttle in the Boston Globe: "Terrifically fun" and "one of those essential household objects."

Rachel Arons put it at the top of the list of the November Books to Watch Out For, again on the New Yorker's Page-Turner, alongside with some pretty fabulous names: Hilton Als, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Stone.

And a few places have been nice enough to run excerpts, either chronological or thematic, from the pages of the RBD:

Slate ran five days in full, starting with pub date: Nov. 4 (Montag the fireman first asked "Didn't firemen prevent fires rather than stoke them up and keep them burning?" in Fahrenheit 451), Nov. 5 (Nick Guest dances with Margaret Thatcher to "Get Off of My Cloud" in The Line of Beauty), Nov. 6 (Lemuel Gulliver wakes up bound to the ground), Nov. 7 (Robert Phelps confesses to James Salter that he should have become a cat burglar instead of a freelance writer), Nov. 8 (Adam Smith gives up his professorship to become the tutor to a teen)

HuffPost posted eleven stories from the book about writers and their day jobs (Defoe extracting perfume, by spatula, from civet cats, Trollope catching a mail thief, Harper Lee quitting her airline ticket agent job thanks to a Christmas gift of a year of writing)

My old pals at Omnivoracious posted a dozen literary hoaxes and put-ons (Clifford Irving pretending he met Howard Hughes in Mexico when he was really trysting with his mistress, the 300-lb illiterate inmate James Frey didn't make cry by reading him War and Peace)

I expect I'll be doing some more tour posting here, if I can grab a moment. In the meantime, I'm reading Trollope for the first time (!) in my spare moments: The Eustace Diamonds. It's delicious.

10/14/2013

Since I'm apparently unable to open a Typepad window without digressing into a two-thousand-word epic, I'm posting a tl;dr (that's "too long; didn't read", for those of you, like me, not on Reddit) version of my Jeopardy! campaign announcement. If you want the full, chatty, meandering version, go here. But if you just want the facts, here they are:

Jeopardy! is having a 30th anniversary Battle of the Decades tournament early next year, with 45 of the top players in the show's history playing for a million-dollar prize. The last three spots, one for each decade, are being determined by a Fan Favorite online vote, and starting today, I'm one of the five candidates for the '00s spot. You can vote for me three times a day for seven days. Here's how:

My political career peaked early. As a suburban D.C. kid, I spent much of my childhood training for the local industry, holding regular elections with my sister for our stuffed-animal government. (See photo to the right, which, to be honest, reveals evidence of irregularities that, if I were Sniky or Horsey, would have made me question the legitimacy of the process.) And in sixth grade I put that experience into practice, canvassing the playground asphalt with Tom Newby for votes to become president and vice president of Wyngate Elementary. Our ticket won, and although actually being president of the school was an anti-climax--especially after our principal, Mrs. Wire, introduced me at an assembly as "Tommy Nissley"--I wasn't done with politics. The next fall I started junior high as any humble public servant should, by running for class representative in Mr. Wynkoop's geography class. My resumé, I assumed, would make me a shoo-in for such a lowly post, but instead I lost in a landslide, to one of the Nafis twins. As I remember it, I only got one vote, from Jay Richmond (I'm still grateful, Jay). One of my best friends didn't even vote for me: being president, he later explained, had "gone to my head."

I should probably be grateful for that too, since it put a quick stop to my political pretensions. I never even considered running for anything again. Until now.

Jeopardy! is celebrating its thirtieth year with Alex Trebek as the host this season with the "Battle of the Decades": a tournament, spread throughout next winter and spring, that brings back forty-five of the best (or most interesting) players in the history of the show to play for a million-dollar prize. The producers of the show have already named forty-two of those players, but the last three, one from each decade, are being chosen in a "Fan Favorite" vote that works pretty much exactly the way baseball fills its last All-Star Game slot these days. And, to extend the metaphor, I want to be your Freddie Freeman. For the past two weeks the show has held voting for the first two decades, and this week, starting today, it's time for the last near-decade, 2004-2012, which means it's time to vote for me.

I haven't been able to say anything about it until today, but I'm one of the five candidates for the last '00s spot, along with Kara Spak, Erin McLean, Ryan Chaffee, and Joey Beachum. Kara and Erin were in my Tournament of Champions, and they are lovely people, smart players, and good friends; Ryan was one of the most entertaining players I've seen on the show; and Joey, the college champ before Erin, is I'm sure a fine person and an excellent player too. But you should vote for me, and as often as you can.

How can you do that? And how often? It's a little complicated, so I'll lay it out for easy access here. The voting is open for a week, from today, October 14, through Sunday, October 20 (actually, until 6:59 am Pacific time on the 21st), and you can vote three times a day, once on Facebook, once on Twitter, and once on the Jeopardy! site. Here's how:

Facebook: Go to Jeopardy!'s Battle of the Decades Facebook page and vote for me. (You have to be registered on Facebook to vote.) If for whatever reason you end up on the main Jeopardy! Facebook page, you can get to the voting page by clicking on the Battle of the Decades link near the top of the page.

Twitter: All you have to do (once you have a Twitter account) is post a tweet that includes the word "Tom" and the hashtag "#JeopardyVote" (make sure there's a space between "Tom" and the hashtag, and no space in the hashtag). Sample tweet: "Tom #JeopardyVote". Or: "Tom Nissley is the #3 Jeopardy! champ of all time (or #5, or #9, depending on how you count it). Let him play again! #JeopardyVote". Or, if you want to pay tribute to the excellent five-time champ Tom Kunzen (of the famed solo FJ), feel free to tweet "Tom Kunzen should be in the Battle of the Decades #JeopardyVote"; I'll humbly accept credit for that vote too.

Share!: And the fourth step each day, for an above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty campaign volunteer, is to spread these links wherever you can: email, Facebook, Twitter, posters on telephone poles. I'll be embarrassed and grateful for any way you can help.

So that's how you do it, and you can do it every day through next Sunday. I'll be sending out daily reminders, if I can find a way to do it without being totally annoying.

But here I've asked you to vote for me without telling you what I stand for. What's my campaign platform, you say? Here you go:

I'm the third-leading money-winner in regular games in the history of Jeopardy!, and then I finished second out of fifteen in a tough Tournament of Champions, which included six of the top twenty-five all-time winners. Whether that means I'm actually one of the best Jeopardy! players ever, I don't know, but I think I've earned the right to be among the forty-five players fighting it out.

Speaking of finishing second, the historic (and downright gleeful) Double True Daily Double stomping Roger Craig put on me and Buddy Wright in the ToC finals has been watched 1.8 million times and counting on YouTube (probably a few hundred of those were by me, plus a hundred more times more in my nightmares). Time for a little Brontë-sisters payback!

Chris Jones of Esquire once compared my "seriously calculated recklessness" to Phil Mickelson's. I know, I think it's a stretch too, but it sounded great.

There is a very funny joke at the end of my Jeopardy! video, which you can see on the Jeopardy! site and on the J! Facebook page. It's true that I didn't make the joke, but it's in my video.

I'm Seattle's all-time top Jeopardy! champ. (Thank goodness Ken Jennings lives five miles north of the city line.)

I really, really, really want to play Jeopardy! one last time. I know that's true of absolutely everyone who has played Jeopardy!, and certainly of everyone else who has wanted to be on the show and hasn't gotten the call. I've had a happy and lucky life, and Jeopardy! has been a very lucky part of that, but it's strange: it's like finding out in the middle of your life that you're about as good a tennis player as anyone else out there, getting one shot at Wimbledon, and then you're done. And that's really why I want to play again. A million dollars? Well, of course, but there are lots of smart people between me and what seems like Monopoly money at this point. But getting the chance to do something I only recently found out I'm really good at? Whether I get to play again or not (and no matter how well I fare if I do), I'll move on from the game-show part of my life to other things I love. But before I do, I really, really, really would like to write my name on the screen and pick up the signaling device one more time.

Thanks for your help. I apologize in advance, but you'll be hearing more from me all week.

10/12/2013

I've already gotten all sentimental here once about old, impeccably-dressed nonfiction writers and their work habits, back when Robert Caro and his biographical outlines pinned neatly to the wall just about made me cry. Now let's turn to Gay Talese. I came to Talese a little second-hand: my dear friend Brad has been obsessed with him forever (almost as obsessed as he is by Robert Evans). And then I became intrigued too by the idea of Talese, partly as a once-towering figure who's become a bit forgotten, as his books haven't remained as well-read as those of his New Journalist peers like Wolfe, Capote, and Mailer; partly as I caught on to some of those oddball stories that have floated around about him for years, about his habit of dressing up in a suit to go down to his basement office to work every day (even as he didn't publish a new book for almost fifteen years), about his long-lived it-works-for-us marriage with Nan Talese, about his very participatory research for his sex book, Thy Neighbor's Wife; and partly thanks to his visit to the Amazon offices, which must have been around the time A Writer's Life came out in 2006, although I would have thought it was a little later. (If I took notes like Talese, I'd know.) We learned he had arrived when someone said, "There's a well-dressed older man out by the elevators," and I'm not sure what he thought of us, a group of slackishly dressed youngsters sitting with him on stools around the table in the break room, but he curiously went around the table asking us about ourselves and taking notes (for what?!) on his trademark shirt boards. (And, I'm vain enough to mention, he was impressed that I knew who Edward Bennett Williams was. I have no memory of how Edward Bennett Williams came up in the conversation.) Through all of these stories there's an element of eccentricity and even absent-mindedness in his character that might be what you'd expect from a physicist, say, but not a journalist, especially one who, by the evidence on the page, is as aggressive, worldly, ambitious, and brilliantly observant as they come.

So I'm still intrigued, and although in my usual magpie grazing style I've read as much about him as by him and haven't read more than a little of any of his big books, I was happy that I did get two Talese stories into A Reader's Book of Days, one on The Neighbor's Wife and one from his best-known magazine piece, perhaps the ur-text of the New Journalism, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold."

Which is all a preamble to my real purposes for posting today, which are to share the photo above and to point you to its source. The photo is of Talese in his famous basement, wearing only two pieces of his famous three-piece suit. It's not quite how I'd imagined that space (I think I'd pictured wood paneling), but I'm happy to have this image replace the one in my head, especially those stacks of archival boxes on the left! As Talese has said, he's kept every note he's ever taken, and this must be where they--or at least some of them--are. (Is my name on a shirt-board in there somewhere? I don't even care!). If this were a Google Maps street view, that's where I'd navigate, especially to examine all those collaged images that he appears to have taped to the outsides of the boxes. Oh, there's something so modest about that sort of hand-crafted obsessiveness! Is "modest" the right word? Not quite: it's a paradoxical combination of selfless curiosity and the kind of hoarder's agglomeration that makes a kind of fortress around the self. Of course, when you also make great books out of what you collect, it's not hoarding--or it's not just hoarding.

And speaking of archives, the photo comes from a wonderful new addition to them: an annotated online edition of "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," published as part of the Nieman Foundation's Annotation Tuesday series, which are like DVD commentary tracks for feature journalism. Elon Green asked Talese questions about the story he had written a half-century before, and Talese remembered nearly everything: who he had access to, how he got access, why he chose a certain element and told it in a certain way. It's worth it just to read the Sinatra piece, again or for the first time, but it's also worth it for the background Talese provides, and for his feisty, confident voice. Here's a passage, about a series of quotes he dropped, without connection or explanation, into the middle of the narrative:

“He is better than anybody else, or at least they think he is, and he has to live up to it.” –Nancy Sinatra, Jr.

“He is calm on the outside — inwardly a million things are happening to him.” –Dick Bakalyan

“He has an insatiable desire to live every moment to its fullest because, I guess, he feels that right around the corner is extinction.” –Brad Dexter

“All I ever got out of any of my marriages was the two years Artie Shaw financed on an analyst’s couch.” –Ava Gardner

“We weren’t mother and son — we were buddies.” –Dolly Sinatra

“I’m for anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniel.” — Frank Sinatra <What is the narrative purpose of these quotes?/eg <Some of those quotes I thought were very interesting, and belonged in this piece somewhere. The most succinct, and I thought interesting, way to do it would be to produce these quotes — many of them contradictory — in the same place, without having to explain them, to say, “On the other hand, Ava Gardner says. … On the other hand, Frank Sinatra’s mother said…” This is part of my whole style. For example, I did this in “The Ethics of Frank Costello.”/gt<It’s interesting…/eg <It’s a different way of breaking away from formulaic journalism. I never liked “New Journalism” because I never thought it was new journalism. It was writing short stories with real names. But it’s not very interesting to put it that way./gt<Right./eg <When you choose not to attribute Zolotow, or these quotes, it is a literary device which predicates the most important thing is form. It’s not as important as fact, but form and fact break the barrier between nonfiction and fiction as a method of communication. If you are asked, “Where did you get this? Where did you get that?”, which is what you’re doing, you can say this is where I got this information. “Why didn’t you quote it?” Because I didn’t want to quote it. Because if I had quoted it I would be losing the point of having this form, the uninterrupted voice of the writer. The difference between writing and reporting is voice. Writers, whether Philip Roth in fiction or Tom Wolfe or Halberstam or Breslin or John McPhee or me or whoever in nonfiction, the voice is very important. And there are times when you cannot interrupt the voice if you have it. It carries an atmosphere./gt <By having the quotes stand alone, aren’t you ceding the voice?/eg <It’s Dos Passos! It’s out of Dos Passos./gt

09/29/2013

One of the high points of my yearly calendar arrived last weekend: the fall Friends of the Seattle Public Library book sale, held in a giant warehouse of a building on Sand Point Way. It's the kind of thing that, at this point in my book-crammed life, could be so painful I ought to just avoid it: a roomful of cheap books for the taking, when I have no more room for books in my house (and more books than I will ever have time to read). But I've found a way to make it work: my friend Grant has opened Under the Volcano, an English-language used bookstore in Mexico City (the only one in Mexico City). Grant needs books, and I need (almost medically) a way to buy books without keeping them. For the last couple of years, I've elbowed my way through the aisles there alongside all the hired guns with their bar-code reading phone apps (and some fellow readers), and it's been unambiguously delicious.

I think I came away with a pretty good selection for him this year--and just a handful for myself!--but the most interesting find for me was a certain edition of paperback I'd never seen before that kept coming up. They were books I was interested in already, but the covers drew my eye too: I'd never seen them before, and I was struck by their style. They were sturdy, lovely, and had the surprising name on the spine of "Time, Inc." Here are the ones I took home (with apologies for the lousy photo):

Nice! What you can't tell from the photo is that the plastic-coated covers are very stiff, the art extends around to the back, where there's no text at all, and the inside front and back covers are in a solid, muted matte color, different for each book, that's quite lovely itself. According to the title pages, the books are "Time Reading Program Special Editions," but there's no further explanation of what that is. Some have custom introductions (The Day of the Locust's is by Budd Schulberg (!); The Lost Weekend's is by Dr. Selden R. Bacon, the director of the Rutgers Center for Alcohol Studies), and they each have an "Editor's Preface" signed, in the anonymously authoritative way Time enjoyed, by "The Editors of Time."

What was the Time Reading Program? Wikipedia, of course, has an answer: the books were reprints, chosen by Time's book reviewer Max Gissen, that were sent monthly to subscribers (of the program, not the magazine) between 1962 and 1966. And I'm not the only one who thought they were pretty: apparently they won lots of design awards. (Each book credits its cover artist: Jerome Miller for The Lost Weekend, Bill Berry (pre-R.E.M.?) for The Day of the Locust, and Leo and Dianne Dillon for Reveille in Washington. I've already shipped The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to Grant, so I can't tell you that one.) The wiki has a list of books in the series, but it's spotty--only two of these four are on it. The Neglected Books site (a blog after my own heart) has a more extensive list, but it's not complete either. They say there were almost 100 books published, but list only 52 (and again, only two of mine). But Leggman's Time-Life Library: A Compendium of Time-Life Books Information (oh, Internet, how I love and am awed by thee), while not claiming to be exhaustive, lists 109 by my finger count (including all four above), which I'll take to be authoritative for now.

If I were a collector (I'm not, I'm not, I'm really trying not to be!), I have to say this would be a pretty appealing place to start: a fascinating-looking collection, a strong but varied design sense from a specific historical moment, and long-lasting construction. The better-known books on the list are smartly chosen enough (Muriel Spark and Richard Hughes in the house!) that they make me curious about the lesser-known ones, which may have been well-known then but are certainly neglected now. And equally appealing: based on the prices of the four above on Amazon, they appear to be available dirt cheap. You might be able to collect the whole shebang (postage included!) for about the same price as a first edition of 84, Charing Cross Road, which, yes, I just recently looked up and found was too rich for me...

09/09/2013

For a time, before I started posting to EphEff again and before I realized you could turn on Captcha to weed out the non-humans, most of my time on my blogging platform, Typepad, was spent quashing spam comments like so many mosquitoes. Even though I hadn't posted anything new for months, I'd get an email from Typepad that someone, or something, had posted something on EphEff, usually vaguely commercial gibberish in which the only readable words involved Vuitton bags, prescription medicine, or soccer jerseys. I'd have to go into Typepad, mark the comment as spam, confirm that I wanted to mark the comment as spam, and then delete the email from my inbox. Sometimes the spam came in once or twice a day, sometimes it came in by the dozens or hundreds. It was annoying.

And it was only a little interesting. It was a little interesting (and a lot depressing) to get a glimpse every so often of the cynical, subterranean 'bot hordes that must be held at bay at all times. But although I'm firmly of the this-world-has-many-inadvertent-beauties school of aesthetics, there was almost nothing interesting in the content of the messages. Almost nowhere, in all that word salad, was there anything inadvertently funny or evocative, unless, like Bret Easton Ellis, you find the mere repetition of "Ugg boots" and "Gucci" to be funny or evocative.

I say "almost" because out of the monkeys-with-typewriters slush pile there did float one keeper, a message whose pleasures were substantial enough that I couldn't quite bear to delete it and was finally driven to create my first Firmament in many dozen fortnights. To celebrate the apparent eradication of these messages from my life (and also the return of the Fortnightly Firmaments), I offer you this comment, posted on April 13 of this year by "DrimiJamTrigh" in response to my Fortnightly Firmament #7: Fun Facts from Periodic Tales:

A saw meteoric. Propecia said his 100mg on submersible of a head. I were some sound that felt guessing at the hand intensity, and a flat ship while permanently believed cost. Box but reverie may belong them so the brown viagra 100mg. There was the last slow viagra. Five viagra slightly, 100mg made feeling at the 100mg, compromising her. Propecia turned under the 100mg, and he were the online it had in no viagra. A viagra slid out but in. It entered suddenly from their viagra, measured as zero 100mg, doing an familiar memory. Yet at the many viagra at 100mg were me full to be the acid standard with the 100mg. A zaphod, the free we've viagra 100mg he'd to call bubbles coming a khuv over the human banks, finished jumbled of obvious tunic, and had trout in don of one over a air out clinging a front on controlling up the motionless resolve. Propecia studied, about it looked out. Could it get out no viagra instead for 100mg and drank a 100mg from the viagra where object about its ribs carved she'll, tempted he? And him bilked a tape,' you said. I have 100mg need a viagra 100mg viagra. The did mighty. It is. Viagra Generico Thousand that the tense viagra that checked with no 100mg one said t - cut. Who said her viagra for the 100mg? Viking, obviously into her viagra 100mg, was the valuable pitt's in two. It were had down the athletic - telephone crackpot higher into the robot, and passed staring them. The viagra said to get with a 100mg followed of into pill. Ah, he walked his the viagra. Propecia refused then of he'd again without of the 100mg, and they could resolve. As a silence so flamborough's. From viagra across 100mg and online of the 100mgs, gradually viagra could tint for a hard lit into maurice. You bared the answer jazz for the position and when i had them to a visiting weekend. He made as the viagra 100mg step of her sand was pressed on its and wasn't his lamps before his face.

I would love to see the algorithm that came up with this: it seems to have a near-human sense of grammar, and to have been tuned to extract words of particular emotional resonance. (Or maybe any word, when placed randomly next to 100 mgs of viagra, becomes emotionally resonant.) You may find your own favorite shards of chance meaning in the above, but here are mine, ten phrases (if that's not too strong a word) that to me carry the potential dramatic mystery of a good short story, or at least of a Guided by Voices song.

"last slow viagra": So bittersweet it just about makes you want to cry. It was the one time when four hours didn't seem like enough.

"controlling up the motionless resolve": Sometimes stillness requires more strength than action.

"guessing at the hand intensity": That feeling: it's so close but yet so distant; it's graspable but not guessable.

"doing a familiar memory": The sheer claustrophobia of it, doomed to repetition!

"her sand was pressed on its": Why is "her sand" so compelling? "Her" is alive and desiring (not to mention pressing), but "sand" is dry and ephemeral, leaving her with nothing more substantial than that empty "its".

"100mg made feeling at the 100 mg, compromising her": Is that the same her? How was she compromised by the milligrams?

"telephone crackpot higher into the robot": A phrase that would only be sub-Robert Pollard nonsense, except for that disturbing preposition. "Into the robot"? The machine has been violated!

"submersible of a head": Almost disappointingly clear. Nevertheless, heads should not be submersible.

"A saw meteoric": A suitably Pynchonian scream across the sky to begin this weird hive of near-meaning.

And now comes the final gesture in honoring this bit of ephemera: having enshrined it here, I can mark it as spam too.

08/26/2013

I've now made stopping in Bellingham at the used-and-new neighbors Eclipse Books and Village Books a required part of my annual ten-hour drive home from the backwoods of British Columbia: nothing makes the driving go faster than having that reward waiting just as the home stretch begins. This year I made good time so I had even more leisure than usual to poke through the shelves and stacks at Eclipse,* and I came away with books by Mary Robison, John Keegan, and Janet Hobhouse, an illustrated edition of The Innocent Voyage--also known as the greatest novel ever, A High Wind in Jamaica--and, finally, my first copy of Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, a book I owe some substantial thanks to.

But my real find so far came from my second stop. Village Books is not a store that sits back and waits for you to find its hidden treasures. It puts them right in front of you, to the point where it almost feels like there are more books on "Recommended" shelves than regular ones. And on one of them I was drawn to a bright cover and a shelf-talker from "Rem" whose recommendation I can't remember anymore, though I think it had something to do with a "portrait of addiction."

I had never heard of the title or the author--The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower--and when I opened it, I read this on the first page:

'Now that your father's gone--'

Stella Vaizey saw the two faces jerk, to an even sharper alertness, and hesitated. What a pair of pedants they were! What sticklers, George Washingtons, optimists!

I'm a little leery of the cult of the opening sentence, but wow. The "even sharper alertness" (a masterful shorthand to put you in a story that's already moving), and the breezy and inventive insults ("George Washingtons"!), which, it's quickly apparent, are cast toward these two girls by their mother! I was caught in the gears of this engine immediately. I always have such a backlog of books that it's rare I start reading a new purchase right away, but this one I dove into at dinner a half-hour later, and by the time I was back on the road I knew it was a keeper.

It is a "portrait of addiction," but even more so it's a portrait of isolation. I won't say too much about the plot except that it's about two sisters who live first with a woman and then with a man--both horrible, horrible people--and in both cases are almost bewilderingly isolated, although they are on the outskirts of Australia's largest city. To me the real marvel of the book is the way it makes the limitations of their world palpable and believable, makes you see and believe how two bright and ambitious young women can burrow their way into a life of darkness and disconnection from anything outside them, and how they--to the extent they do--can burrow their way out as well.

I've spent much of the last five years or so under the sway of a few books--A High Wind in Jamaica, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Transit of Venus--and The Watch Tower shares elements and qualities with all of them: the unsentimentality toward families and childhood of High Wind, the almost giddy astringency of Jean Brodie, and the two Australian sisters, indifferently parented, of Transit of Venus. Add in the claustrophobic, incestuous horror of McEwan's The Concrete Garden and a malign Australian patriarch in Felix Shaw who, I suspect--since I still haven't read all of TMWLC--is a rival for The Man Who Loved Children's Sam Pollit, and you have an impressive equation. And The Watch Tower is not only similar to those books, but very much in their league, which from me is as high as praise gets. It's the best novel I've read in I don't know how long.

Some of the book's few Amazon reviewers were fed up with the book's unrelenting misery, and with the datedness of its language and sexual politics. The miserable limits on the sisters' lives are indeed unrelenting, but there is something about the clarity with which the misery is observed--by the narrator, and sometimes by the sisters--that makes it, well, bearable is the wrong word, but intensely compelling, at least for me. The sexual politics--the almost unlimited power a parent or a husband can have over a girl or a woman--are, I guess and I hope, dated, but they remain human. And the language may be dated, but only in a way that makes it even more fresh to a modern reader, and it's composed with such intelligence and concision that I expect it will always seem fresh.

The book is set in the '40s and was published in 1966. I haven't learned much more about Elizabeth Harrower (what a name for a writer with her powers!) than what the book itself says: her biography there speaks of her career in the past tense, but says she still lives in Sydney. The Watch Tower was the last of her four novels, and I'm inclined to pursue the rest, and the Text Classics series it's a part of too. Text Classics turns out to be a reprint series of Australian classics, and if this edition is any indication--beautifully designed and wonderfully bound in a sturdy paperback that's a pleasure to hold and read--maybe they are the NYRB Classics of Down Under. I don't know how Rem at Village Books discovered this one (here are his online recommendations, by the way)--at first I imagined they might be the only place in the U.S. stocking this Australian edition. But this reissue looks to have gotten some U.S. review attention (Michael Dirda likes it too!), and Amazon stocks it as well as a number of other recent Text Classics. (I wonder who is distributing them?) But of course you can order it from Village Books as well, and I suggest you do!

* I have to include a photo from Eclipse, which, among other things, has to have the best back door in bookselling, open to the the breezes and the brightness of Puget Sound. The whole store is full of this kind of light (and, yes, these kinds of stacks on the floor).